Los Alamos National Laboratory: You know The Real Story. You know The Corporate Story. Now you'll know The Rest of the Story.

May 4, 2007

Comments from George Maschke

Hi, I'm George Maschke (the same who appears in the video). Polygraph examiner Bruce Burgess's vague assertion that because he saw reactions to both the control questions and the relevant questions, he "knew someone was messing around" is rubbish. There is nothing in the polygraph literature to support any such notion.

And the above claim by an anonymous commentator that "you cannot beat the polygraph" is contradicted by the available peer-reviewed research (by Charles Honts and collaborators, citations in the bibliography of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.) The notion that the polygraph can detect lies at all, let alone with 99.9% accuracy, is patently absurd (see Chapter 1 of the The Lie Behind the Lie Detector and the sources cited therein).

As for the vaunted "DoD training" that all federal polygraph examiners receive, it's 14 weeks -- less than half the length of the typical barber college. And while graduates of barber college can generally cut hair, graduates of polygraph school cannot detect lies.

Additional relevant documentation on polygraph "testing" is available from AntiPolygraph.org.